Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Reprioritizing and redefining email marketing success for 2023
By Kate Nowrouzi, VP of Email Deliverability, Mailgun by Sinch
As another year comes to a close, our inboxes are filled to the brim with an overabundance of emails from brands. Email marketers are faced with the difficult task of ensuring their campaigns cut through the noise and land among those that not only make it through to their recipients, but stand out enough to drive conversions. Part of that work involves taking regular stock of the technology at your disposal and how you put it to use; even small changes to a marketing strategy can be the deciding factor in its success.
Here are some email marketing techniques that will move the needle in 2023, as well as others that we can leave behind in 2022.
Redefining email marketing success
Email open rates as a performance metric, for one, can be safely left in the past. For years, email developers have pleaded with marketers that open rates are an unreliable measure of a campaign’s success: they’re easily manipulated, and Apple’s privacy push at the end of 2021 made them all the more murky. In 2023, email marketers will continue to deprioritize open rates, opting for a broader definition of “success” for campaigns and remembering that even small bumps in sales or decreased abandoned carts mean something’s working.
Improving odds of gaining new customers
Though the open rate is a flawed performance metric, email marketers still need to ensure their carefully-crafted messages actually make it to their destinations, making deliverability a consistently crucial concern. Email lists are growing, and inboxes have become more crowded than ever. The new year brings an opportunity for you to lean into tech – such as email verification tools – to increase the chances of your emails being received and read by your target audiences. These solutions validate whether the email addresses on your lists are real, and determine the likelihood of the recipient opening your emails, based on prior behavior. Verification tools make your email lists more strategic, ensuring high deliverability, and saving the sender’s reputation.
An elevated customer experience on mobile
However, deliverability is less impressive if the email loses its polish when viewed on a phone instead of a computer as the developer intended. In today’s mobile-first world, meeting customers where they are is paramount. In 2023, mobile optimization for email will be critical for delivering a seamless, truly omnichannel customer experience. In its simplest form, marketers should ensure their emails render equally well on any device – a laptop, an iPhone, an Android, etc. No customer should receive a substandard email because of the device they use.
Making the inbox actionable
Taking this a step further, I predict leading brands will start leaning into interactive email capabilities for mobile. For example, enabling appointment booking from directly within an email, rather than taking the customer to a browser to log into their customer portal, removes pesky friction from the customer experience and makes your call-to-action much more actionable. Embedded surveys, product pages and purchases, and more can all push email to become a more mature medium, removing unnecessary steps and inciting action on the recipient’s end – making emails a practical tool rather than inbox clutter.
In the coming year, we’ll continue to see brands interacting with customers in new ways over email. Burgeoning tech like artificial intelligence is already seeing promising applications, from enhancing the insights gathered from verification tools to generating effective subject lines. While it’s important to acknowledge the technology and tactics that are worth leaving behind, it’s even more vital to recognize when to hop on board with the tools of the future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Nowrouzi is the Vice President of Email Deliverability & Product Strategy at Mailgun by Sinch. With over 20 years of experience in the messaging and online privacy space, Kate is an active voice in deliverability, email marketing, and the anti-spam community by speaking at conferences worldwide, hosting round tables, and publishing blog posts. She is the co-founder of #emailgeeksSF, a community where email marketers, designers, and developers meet to collaborate, and is passionate about social impact and advocating for women in STEM.
